Most advice on how to start a creative agency assumes a runway: a plan, a website, a pipeline. Nick Stagge’s version took three days and no money at all. He posted on LinkedIn that he was going out on his own as a fractional CMO, and within a week he was running an agency he hadn’t registered yet, billing around $70,000 a month. Six years later The Grounded Company is one of three agencies he runs, still bootstrapped — no loan, no investors, not even his own savings. In Episode 4 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad asks him how that happened and what he’d do differently starting today.

Sixty jobs before nineteen

Nick worked around sixty jobs before he turned nineteen, including talking his way into managing a store with no relevant experience. What he took from it wasn’t hustle mythology — it was a tolerance for discomfort. He got comfortable learning on the fly, and comfortable leaving when something wasn’t working.

The useful residue is a specific kind of calm: if this doesn’t work, something else will come along. That belief is what made starting an agency from zero feel survivable rather than reckless.

The post that accidentally started a company

After stints in-house at Skullcandy and GoPro — both through IPO and after — and a run as CEO of a video production house, Nick decided he didn’t want to work for anyone and didn’t particularly want anyone working for him. He’d be a fractional CMO. He posted exactly that on LinkedIn.

Two leads arrived within ten minutes. Both closed inside twenty-four hours: Dixxon Flannel, who brought him in to build their retail program and who he still works with six years later, and Breville. That was Monday.

Wednesday brought a call from another production group. They had brands they couldn’t serve at their prices and were parceling them out. Except the caller had the wrong idea about Nick — he thought Nick owned a creative agency. When Nick started to correct him, the man explained the actual situation: ten brands, already signed, waiting to be onboarded Monday, because the agency that was supposed to take them had just folded.

Nick said yes. He spent Thursday and Friday setting up a business license, a bank account, and an email address. Monday he started onboarding ten clients while simultaneously hiring designers. Those ten were $50,000 a month in retainers, on top of Dixxon and Breville.

Sell it before you build it

Asked what his first step would be starting from zero today, Nick doesn’t hesitate: sell it before you build it. If you can’t sell it, don’t build it.

His second agency is the clean example. Grounded clients kept asking whether he knew an ad buyer or an email marketing manager. He started referring people out, then white-labeling the work under Grounded contracts — learning the process, keeping the client relationship. Only when that white-labeled business hit roughly $35,000 a month did he spin up Adapted as its own agency and bring the freelancer in-house.

The thing that irritates him is the opposite pattern: founders with a logo, business cards, and a website who have never spoken to a single potential customer. The first conversation should be about what problems someone has, which of them you can solve, and what that’s worth to them. Deliver against that and you have a company.

What actually works in content now

Content has a shorter shelf life than ever, and platforms decide who sees it. So the job is to stop the scroll and start building trust. Expecting a first touchpoint to convert a sale happens occasionally, but as a strategy it doesn’t last.

Nick splits creative into two categories that behave differently. Foundational work — brand, website, packaging — is closer to compound interest: hard to attribute, slow to pay off, but everything else rests on it. Marketing content is the opposite: test constantly, let data decide.

His teams run this in two-week sprints, deliberately borrowed from how dev teams work. Ship something, give it two weeks, read the data, iterate, overlap the next sprint. When a formula starts working, put 70 to 80 percent of your effort into scaling it and keep the remaining 20 to 30 on new ideas — because every winning formula eventually expires.

Whose opinion wins

Clients arrive with strong views about how their brand should look. Nick’s rule for handling that is neat: on foundational work, the client’s opinion matters more than anyone’s. On marketing creative, the customer’s opinion matters more.

The job is bridging those two, not picking a side. Lean too far into marketing and the brand becomes soulless, a blip that disappears. Stay too rigid on brand and you’ve built something you love that nobody cares about.

Ten years of LinkedIn, one year of crickets

The post that started the company didn’t come from nowhere. Nick had been posting on LinkedIn regularly for about a decade. The first year produced nothing — no business, no traction. He was writing thought leadership, recapping articles from his own field, which he now describes as a sales pitch everybody could see through.

What changed was writing like a person: the trip to Iceland, the problems in the business, the difficulty of balancing work and life. It still didn’t produce leads immediately. It produced conversations, podcast invitations, and magazine columns — and those compounded into the moment when one post could land two clients in a day.

Lead flow today is word of mouth, partner referrals, and organic social. Across all three of his agencies, he has never run an ad and never sent a cold email or DM.

Things that don’t scale

Nick writes handwritten letters to clients and seals them with wax. Not on a drugstore card — on something custom.

His argument is that this doesn’t just close deals, it keeps them for years, because clients start treating you like you’re in-house. He knows about their lives; he’s held their kids in the office. He credits his teenage son with reframing why any of it matters: behind every client is someone whose business feeds a family and a team.

Client red flags, in order

Nick has walked away from leads and terminated contracts. His filter runs in a strict sequence.

People first: smart, ambitious, communicative, respectful. If those four aren’t there, nothing else matters. Product second — early on he took on a product he privately didn’t believe would sell, and it didn’t; he eventually walked away because he couldn’t keep taking the money. Third is willingness to invest. Not big budgets, but not endless nickel-and-diming either. He recently ended a negotiation where concessions kept being met with fresh demands.

“We’re the carpenter and AI is the hammer”

Clients do arrive asking for AI-generated creative at a discount. Nick’s answer: they use AI as a tool, but they’re not replacing the carpenter with the hammer — and if that’s what a client wants, they’re not the right agency.

His objection is practical rather than romantic. Today AI hands you the average, the middle, assembled from what your competitors already did. He points at the identical templated flyers everyone’s neighbours produced last summer. If you’re Nike with an in-house AI team and unlimited budget, fine. If you’re doing $10 to $50 million a year and lean on AI for creative, you become interchangeable.

The template trap makes the point for him: clients come asking his team to make them templates because the ten thousand existing ones aren’t working. The problem isn’t which templates — it’s templates.

What’s next

The plan for the next 18 to 24 months is to double revenue and hire a GM or CEO to run Grounded. The hard part isn’t the revenue target, it’s that the growth has to come from somewhere other than Nick. He’s already pulling himself out of day-to-day client work, staying in quarterly reviews but out of deliverables.

His reasoning is honest about himself: he’s a builder, and the moment he’s only maintaining and optimizing, he’s both bad at it and bored — which would eventually cost the team and the clients. Notably, none of this is aimed at an acquisition. He wants someone else running it well, not a sale.

For a different take on saying no to clients and earning that right as you grow, see our episode with Josh Webber of Big Red Jelly.

Find Nick at thegroundedcompany.com or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.

Voice AI agents are moving from novelty to infrastructure, and the companies building them have a reliability problem nobody talks about. James Zammit co-founded Roark (YC W25) to solve it — and did it with a team of six that counts Google and AT&T among its customers and processes millions of call minutes a month. In Episode 3 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad asks him how a company that small lands enterprise clients, and where he thinks voice AI still has no business picking up the phone.

Two startups that were too early

Before Roark there were two others: a music collaboration app in 2015 and a chatbot company in 2018, back when chatbots were universally disliked and the underlying technology simply wasn’t there. James is clear-eyed about why they didn’t work — wrong timing, no domain expertise, and founders who were early in their careers.

Two corrections matter more than the rest. The first is speed. One earlier product took a year and a half to reach its first version, because they wanted it perfect. By launch, either someone had beaten them to it or the thing they’d polished turned out to be something nobody wanted. He borrows an analogy from Michael Seibel: to find a leak in a pipe, you can inspect every inch by hand, or turn on the water and let the leak announce itself.

The second is that they used to believe a great product sells itself. It doesn’t. Distribution and sales matter just as much, and that lesson took a decade.

What Roark actually does

Anyone shipping a voice agent hits the same wall: you change a prompt, and you have no idea what you broke. The only way to find out is to call your own agent, over and over, through dozens of scenarios. James and his co-founder hit this themselves building an agent for a dental clinic, where patients kept getting stuck in loops and failing to confirm insurance.

Roark started as analytics — “the Mixpanel for voice” — and grew into two things: simulation testing that runs an agent through hundreds of scenarios, personas, and accents in parallel inside your CI/CD pipeline, and post-call analysis that scores every real conversation on dozens of metrics and points at what to fix.

How six people landed Google and AT&T

No ads. The mix was outbound to teams building in voice, referrals, published content, and — for some of the larger names — inbound. Then the ordinary sequence: demo, pilot, contract.

The unglamorous truth underneath is that none of that survives a bad product. James keeps returning to the YC line about building something people want: simple to say, hard to actually do.

Twenty agents instead of twenty hires

Roark runs more than twenty internal agents. Three examples give the flavour.

The changelog agent reads the week’s pull requests, drafts the changelog, and takes its own screenshots. Monday morning someone reviews it and sends. Four or five hours of a PM’s week become thirty seconds of attention.

The on-call agent picks up CloudWatch alarms, investigates, and either opens a pull request for a human to review or writes up what it found. The broadcast agent solves a small, real annoyance: Roark keeps a shared Slack channel with each larger customer, and announcements used to mean pasting the same message a dozen times. Now it goes into one channel called Broadcast and fans out, picking up new customer channels by naming convention. Three prompts replaced a job that other companies pay a tool to do.

None of these are impressive alone. That’s the point — they’re the boring work that quietly justifies the next hire.

The unglamorous half: infrastructure

The other half of staying lean is refusing to let engineers lose days to setup. Everything is infrastructure as code, using Pulumi and SST. Every engineer gets a production-like environment with one command, with preview deploys, end-to-end tests, and alerts on everything.

James has worked somewhere that editing a single page meant three days of fighting to get data running. His argument: with today’s coding tools, setting things up properly takes no longer than doing it badly.

Where voice AI should stop

Appointment scheduling, reminders, prescription refill nudges — all fully automatable today, in his view. His line for what shouldn’t be automated is risk-based: if getting it wrong costs a life or a six-figure deal, a human still picks up. Anyone calling in genuine crisis belongs in that category.

He’s equally candid about what still breaks. A bad phone line plus background noise — a human decodes that better. People switching languages mid-sentence. Interruptions, where the hard part isn’t handling them but stopping the agent from rudely cutting the customer off. And pronunciation: ask an agent to read back an email address and watch it mangle the spelling. Entire companies exist to fix just that.

The architecture is shifting underneath all this. For the past year most production systems were cascade models — separate speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech components stitched together. Over the last six months more of Roark’s customers have moved to speech-to-speech models, which handle interruptions so naturally that callers often don’t notice they’re talking to software.

Should the agent admit it’s AI?

James expects regulation to answer part of this, and Roark follows whatever the local law says. His own position is a hybrid: booking a table, nobody cares who answered. Discussing a prescription, probably say it. Finding exactly where that line sits, he admits, is genuinely hard.

His broader thesis is blunter: anyone with a publicly facing phone number will eventually be a voice agent. And there’s an argument that the machine is sometimes better — a legal office that closes at five loses the customer who calls at six, and an agent doesn’t.

Malta, San Francisco, and what YC actually reads

James and his co-founder are both Maltese and moved to San Francisco. His advice on geography: move to where your customers are — New York for finance, London for parts of Europe — but don’t let location stop you from starting. If you won’t relocate, commit to being there a couple of weeks a quarter.

On YC applications, his read is that where you’re from matters far less than where you’ll be during and after the batch. And what they’re really testing isn’t the idea but how you got to it: did you talk to twenty people, do they all have this pain, what are they doing about it now, will they pay. Building blindly on a hunch is the thing that fails.

For the rest of the conversation on where voice AI is heading, see also our episode with Elad Hefetz on how AI is reshaping search and discovery.

Find James at roark.ai or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.